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August 1, 2012
Who's Against the Olympics? Taxpayers Most Notably
Real Clear Markets
by Steven Malanga
On July 6, 2005, Londoners celebrated in Trafalgar Square as giant television screens carried the announcement by the International Olympic Committee that the city had won the right to host the 2012 Summer Olympics. Back in New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg apologized to America because his city's bid to host those games, which Bloomberg had pursued ardently, fell short.
...But these sorts of experiences don't stop elected officials. In New York may Mayor Bloomberg lost the Olympics' bid but then turned his attention to helping push through the massive Atlantic Yards redevelopment project in Brooklyn, whose centerpiece is the new Barclay's Center arena where the former New Jersey Nets will now play. To make the 22-acre project possible in the middle of the borough New York government used the threat of eminent domain to displace some 400 residents and two dozen businesses. Politicians also gave the developers hundreds of millions of dollars in tax incentives to construct the arena, all on the basis that the project would upgrade a neighborhood where people were already paying upwards of $500,000 for condos and co-ops. Of course, the marketplace has a way of intervening with the best laid plans of government, and so while the Barclays arena is scheduled to open this fall, the developers have pushed back construction of the project's residential towers thanks to the housing bust.
After Chicago lost its bid in 2009 to host the 2016 Olympics, President Obama criticized naysayers who urged the city not to try. "I mean, who's against the Olympics?" he said. Right now in London I'm betting there are quite a few taxpayers and business owners who can provide the President with an adequate answer to that question.
Posted by eric at August 1, 2012 8:04 PM